I am satisfied the present Chinese labor invasion (it is not in any proper sense immigration--women and children do not come) is p...ernicious and should be discouraged. Our experience in dealing with the weaker races--the negroes and Indians, for example--is not encouraging. We shall oppress the Chinamen, and their presence will make hoodlums and vagabonds of their oppressors. I therefore would consider with favor suitable measures to discourage the Chinese from coming to our shores. But I suspect that this bill is inconsistent with our treaty obligations.... If it violates the National faith, I must decline to sign it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

...I am useless, one more girl who couldn't be sold. When I visit the family now, I wrap my American successes around me like a pr...ivate shawl. I am worthy of eating the food. From afar I can believe my family loves me fundamentally. They only say, "When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls," because that is what one says about daughters. But I watched such words come out of my own mother's and father's mouths; I looked at their ink drawing of poor people snagging their neighbors' flotage with long flood hooks and pushing the girl babies on down the river. And I had to get out of hating range. I read in an anthropology book that Chinese say, "Girls are necessary too"; I have never heard the Chinese I know make this concession. Perhaps it was a saying in another village.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talk-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We cou...ld be heroines, swordswomen. Even if she had to rage across all China, a swordswoman got even with anybody who hurt her family. Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Thus I believe that without doing violence to the ancient doctrine of the Chinese, one can say that the Li has been brought by the... perfection of its nature to choose, from several possibilities, the most appropriate; and that by this means it has produced the Ki (Ch'i) or matter with dispositions such that all the rest has come about by natural propensities, in the same way that Monsieur Descartes claims to bring forth the present order of the world as a consequence of a small number of initially generated assumptions. Thus the Chinese, far from being blameworthy, merit praise for their ideas of things being created by their natural propensity and by a pre-established harmony.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Navarette, a Chinese missionary, agrees with Leibniz and says that "It is the special providence of God that the Chinese did not k...now what was done in Christendom; for if they did, there would be never a man among them, but would spit in our faces."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It was not sufficient for the disquiet of our minds that we disputed at the end of seventeen hundred years upon the articles of ou...r own religion, but we must likewise introduce into our quarrels those of the Chinese. This dispute, however, was not productive of any great disturbances, but it served more than any other to characterize that busy, contentious, and jarring spirit which prevails in our climates.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »